reCaptcha

Posted on March 9, 2008 by Alvin Trusty

I have been getting a lot of comment spam on my blog.  I don’t want to restrict posting only to those that have gone through the (sometimes tedious) process of setting up an account on my server.  There is a place for that, but not on my blog.

I found a free plugin for WordPress called reCaptcha.  You have probably used a captcha before.  It’s one of the fuzzy-looking letter combinations that you have to type to prove you are a human and not an automated spam-bot. Below is an example from my new comment plugin.

recaptcha.png

After typing your comment, enter the letters you see and your comment will go through.

This should eliminate all the comment spam without creating a headache to the humans that create normal posts.

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3 Responses to reCaptcha

  1. John Schinker says:
    March 10, 2008 at 5:33 am

    I’m interested to see how this works out. I’d like to move away from the “you have to register to comment” model, but not having spam on my blog is more important than making it easy to comment.

    The other cool thing about Recaptcha is that it’s solving real problems. When digitizing print materials, computers have trouble recognizing some words. Those images are used in the Recaptcha challenges. Once a certain confidence threshold is reached, the problem is considered “solved.” So by commenting on the blog, you’re helping to digitize books.

  2. Alvin Trusty says:
    March 10, 2008 at 6:23 am

    Almost as soon as I turned reCaptcha on, I got a pingback from a spammer. I think I have that fixed now… we’ll see.

    You are correct about the ulterior motive of reCaptcha. Google has a couple of video lectures by the creator of the captcha and recaptcha. I blogged about one of them last year.

    http://www.trustyetc.com/trustyblog/2007/03/15/humans-vs-computers/

  3. John H. Curry says:
    March 10, 2008 at 1:58 pm

    I’ve installed reCaptcha on my blog, and it works like a charm–on the posts that I did AFTER I installed.

    I still get spammed on the old posts, and I haven’t figured out (nor have I really looked) how to stop those from coming. But now I have about five or six a day rather than fifty or sixty.

    Overall, it’s a nice widget.